You're So Funny I Forgot To Laugh (mild/lame rant)

The BBQ Pit
1

These days I earn my living by painting for a fairly large company here in Calgary. Mostly commercial work, which involves big, dirty job sites with messy, smelly product. I hate my job, but soon I’ll be done with it forever, so the light at the end of the tunnel keeps me going. Plus they pay me pretty well compared to the average painter in this city.

So today I’m working at the soon-to-be-open Vertigo Mystery Theatre (live theatre, not movie) in the basement of Palliser Square, adjacent to the Calgary Tower. We’re cooped up in a poorly ventilated, dimly lit area on a massive “dance floor” scaffolding deck with a bunch of welders who are banging away at the metal they’re installing and welding pipes, casting their toxic fumes about like crazy. Meanwhile, my crew is busy painting the metal work once it’s erected, while trying to avoid getting hit by flying sparks or blinded by all the welding arcs. It hasn’t been a pleasant week.

About mid-afternoon, as I’m minding my own business and rolling paint onto yet another handrail, the welding crew pack up and get ready to leave. Apparently these lucky bastards get to leave early on Fridays, even when they’re two days behind schedule. As the top welding guy passes my spot on the floor he offers me this hilarious tidbit:

(Gesturing vaguely and looking like he just invented the finest joke in history) “You missed a spot. Heh, heh, heh.”

I chuckle back, in mock amusement, secretly wishing he’d fall through the floor and impale himself ass-first on a girder.

Why, in all my years of painting do I still have people saying this to me? Do people think it’s funny? Or even slightly original? 'Cuz let me tell ya, it’s neither.

If you’re gonna attempt to make joke around me at the end of a crappy week, they damn well better be more substantial than that. I missed a spot? Maybe I’ll just paint that spot I missed on your face, ya big pinhead! Ha! Ha! Now THAT is funny!

(I warned you it was mild/lame)

2

I hate commercial painting, too.

High, hard, and heavy. That’s a large commercial job in a nutshell.

High: Scaffolds, extension ladders, stilts…

Hard: Spraying two part epoxies (while wearing a Str Trek looking hazmat suit and respirator), or spraying and backrolling (with extesion poles) block sealer on a 24 foot high wall that’s also 180 feet long, or roling out a soffitt on about an acres worth of office building in 100 degree weather…

Heavy: everything in 5 gallon buckets, disassembling/ moving to another area/ and reassembling a two stage scaffold because it’s too damn big to roll through the walkway between the two areas you’re doing, carrying everything upstairs or up ladders because none of the elevators are functional…

That’s why I’m not commercial painting anymore. Restaurant and residential remodel (with a healthy dose of faux finishing), that’s what I do now. Much happier.
Another lame joke: [seeing WET PAINT sign] “bet you’d hate it if I touched it, huh?”

No, I would be amused that you now have a semi toxic, virtually unremoveable substance on your skin, asswipe. I can easily repaint. But, you’ll need my help to get that stuff off of you.

3

poorly ventilated area, toxic fumes…

How’s your head this evening.

4

Tee: Fortunately (?!), the effects from the welding fumes are cumulative, so it’ll take a few weeks or months of this to really start to destroy my respiratory system. So aside from some asthma flareups, which are as much the result of forest fires in the region filling the skies with smoke as they are from my work environment, my head is actually surprisingly clear.

NCB: I was actually just transferred from a job working on a rec centre which featured 40-foot-high walls requiring block filler and two-part epoxy in the swimming pool areas and change rooms. Mercifully, I was sent downtown before the epoxy work started, but I helped roll about 60 pails of block filler in the week I was there.

If I have to paint, I prefer high-end residential where it’s all latex paint on nice, fresh walls and you’re allowed to take your time and do a good job. However, as soon as I get my final construction safety class under my belt in mid-September, I start agressively seeking a cushy safety officer position where I write reports and never pick up another tool.

5

Maybe he was doing it to be deliberately malicious and make you angry and uncomfortable. Did you ever think of that? So next time you see him, deck him.

6

Twice.

7

No, you’re missing the obvious solution:

“Our quality control folks checked, and we covered everything. If there’s a bare spot, it must have been burned off by stuff falling from the welding. We’ll have to repaint the whole thing now! What company did you say you work for again? Accounting will want to know where to send the bill for the extra time and materials to repaint.”

:cool:

8

Good news, everyone!

You don’t have to worry about the effects of the welding fumes. The toxic fumes from the paint itself will cause far more damage than the welding, which is almost insignificant in comparison.

There’s a reason so many professional painters are alcoholics, y’know. There’s a reason they score signficantly lower on tests of intellectual function.

9

Way to perpetuate a stereotype, TVAA.

FTR, I use a respirator (see my above post).

And, asshole, you better have a cite for your fucking moronic statement About low intelligence and alcoholism. I know maybe two painters who fall into that category. All the other several dozen I know are very talented craftsmen with quite a bit of business savvy. So fuck you.

10

Are you surprised, NCB? Look at his recent track record.

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Sorry, Joe K, after reading his poo flinging about two months ago, I stopped reading him if he wasn’t in a thread I had already subscribed to.

What a waste of bandwidth.

12

:smiley:

I agree totally, it’s just that all of them that I know would have jumped down his throat the same way.

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I bet you your Daddy told you that. Did he tell you that it was gonna affect you, too?

See, he was already an alcoholic BEFORE the painting job. And they didn’t let him actually paint, they just had him load and unload stuff. If he hadn’t gotten your Mama pregnant he’d have never gotten the job. (Hey, cousins or not, the family didn’t want you to be a bastard. Didn’t work though, because you still are one.)

OOOOPS! Was that rude? What the hell, it’s the Pit.

(Lots of professional painters in my extended family. Several with college degrees, several more with very sucessful businesses, putting their kids through med school.)

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Paint fumes have a generally depressive effect on the central nervous system. Long-term exposure to high concentrations of the solvents used in paint has a similar effect to significant alcohol exposure.

That’s why so many professionial painters become alcoholics – they need something to help maintain the state their brains have compensated for.

It’s not a stereotype any more than smokers developing lung cancer is a stereotype. It’s just a cruel, sad fact of life.

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Hey, I’m a painter with a B.A. too! Me not dumb neither.

Mostly, we use latex paint which has little or no fumes. Of course, some contain trace amounts of mercury, so it’s not like it’s safe or anything.

16

Cite?

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They aren’t hard to find.

For example, http://www.lungusa.org/occupational/solvents.html

Or http://www.consideration.org/asenjo/alcoholismnutrition.html

It’s fairly common knowledge. Painters have significantly higher rates of alcoholism than the general population. That’s life.

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Chemists live, on average, ten to fifteen years less than their peers.

That’s life, too. It doesn’t matter if your parents are chemists and you don’t like the implications. It also doesn’t matter if your parents were chemists and lived to be 95.

19

Well, your second link doesn’t work, and your first one doesn’t support your claims. (It uses a lot of big words though, maybe you just didn’t understand it.)

A craftsman knows the dangers of his job and takes precautions for them. Most commercial jobs I was on wouldn’t even let you on site if you didn’t meet OSHA requirements for your profession, including respirators and eye and skin protection for using toxic substances.

Like the ALA site listed, many bad things can come exposure to those substances. *That’s why we don’t allow exposure. *

In times past, before it became more apparant just how dangerous many of those things were, Some spraymen would get addicted. Sad, but true. Now, however, even the basic formula for many paints have been changed or are in the process of being changed to make them both more safer to work with and more environmetaly friendly…

As I said, most of the painters I know are skilled craftsmen and intelligent business owners. Yes, I have met the alcoholic painter. But who says it’s painting that led him to alcoholism? He might have been an alcoholic even if he had become a math tutor.

But, the worst thing you did, TVAAsswipe, is to come into a thread about painting, OPd by a painter, posted to by painters, and left a pile of shit post for the sole reason of insulting painters. Try that in real life. With any profession. And tell me how many work boots, sneakers, wingtips, or slingback pumps you’d be removing from your ass.

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Did I just say “more safer”?!?

:smack:

Letting my emotions affect my grammar, sorry. :slight_smile: